Growing Earth plants on Mars presents many challenges. For plants to thrive they need adequate sunlight for photosynthesis, a growing medium (Martian soil has high concentrations of perchlorate salts that present a challenge), and lots of water. Even if we genetically modify these plants to become tolerant to less light and drought resistant, the conditions to produce adequate yields to feed humans planning for long-term stays on the planet remain problematic.

A recently published book, Dinner on Mars, describes the agricultural challenges. Co-authored by Lenore Newman, Canada Research Chair for Food Security at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, and Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph in Ontario, these two ask the question “Can we feed a city on Mars?” It’s a legitimate query considering that Elon Musk and SpaceX have a mission to do just that. What is so interesting about Dinner on Mars, is that in solving the challenges to feed Martians, the authors believe it will change how we grow our food here on Earth.

Water on Mars can be found just below the surface of the regolith. It is frozen. There’s not a lot of it but enough for the right kind of plants to grow. The regolith, however, is toxic (the perchlorate issue), sandy and lacking organic content. The authors propose introducing cyanobacteria which on Earth is found in polluted water. Cyanobacteria is blue-green algae, hence its name. On Mars the bacteria would harvest carbon dioxide (CO2) from the thin atmosphere and tackle the perchlorate in the soil, neutralizing its toxicity. At the same time, the cyanobacteria would produce the missing organic matter needed to support other plant life.

On Mars, some plants would be grown in Martian soil while others would be supported by hydroponics in greenhouses. The vertical farming that is increasingly being done here on Earth in cities will find its element on Mars. The authors believe Martian cities will be filled with plants being grown everywhere and will include salad greens, vegetables, fruit, herbs, coffee and even chocolate. Grains will not take priority because of limited space. And the plants will give back to the human inhabitants by providing oxygen, organic materials for manufacturing, and water filtering and recycling.

What you won’t see on Mars is livestock. No cows, pigs, sheep, goats or chickens. Instead cultivated protein from stem cells will create lab-grown equivalents. Precision fermentation using food waste as the medium combined with yeast, fungi and bacteria will produce the rest of the protein that on Earth is derived from eating meat and soy products like tofu.

Food grown on Mars will need to account for every gram of organic matter added, every millilitre of water, and every photon of light (the maximum amount of light on Mars corresponds in energy to 590 Watts per square metre versus 1,370 here on Earth). With the latter, the use of greenhouse LED lighting will be necessary. And if solar energy is used to power these lights, the size of the arrays will have to be much larger or the panel conversion efficiency will need to be that much greater than the average here on Earth.

One thing the authors of Dinner on Mars don’t talk about in the book is pollinators. On Earth, flies and beetles have been pollinating plants for hundreds of millions of years. Today, farms rely on bees to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. But can bees survive on Mars? A 2019 article in Wired bore the following headline, “Bees, Please: Stop Dying in Your Martian Simulator.” In enclosed habitats designed to simulate the environments of the Moon and Mars, bee deaths were significant amounting to 1,000 to 1,200 every four days and instead of seeking sources of nectar and pollen, the hive inhabitants exhibited wintering behaviour, reducing activity to survive.

If we can’t bring the bees to Mars, then maybe we can invent a robot pollinator. That’s exactly what researchers at Tampere University in Finland have done. They have built a flying robot that responds to light and resembles a dandelion seed. It weighs 1.2 milligrams versus adult honeybees at 120 milligrams. The robot pollinator (seen below) can be powered by a light source such as a laser or LED. Something like this could be further designed to specifically take advantage of Martian conditions making the need for honeybees redundant. The only downside, with no bees there will be no honey to sweeten Martian meals. You can read about the robot pollinator in the journal of Advanced Science in an article published on December 27, 2022.

Now, wireless technology is linked to COVID-19’s emergence in articles appearing on the Internet. One marked double fact-checked that appears on the website News Punch, claims a peer-reviewed scientific study has been published linking the deployment of 5G networks with COVID-19. It states that the study conclusively proves the link between wireless technology and the spread of viruses and illness. The article it points to is a study appearing on the National Institute of Health (NIH) website. In reading the paper, however, nowhere in the content is there a definitive link, just supposition, descriptions of symptoms, and stating they are common to wireless network exposure and the coronavirus. The claim that this paper has been peer reviewed bares inspection.

Technology and Perceived Danger: Some is Real Some is Not

You can list technologies we have accepted for use in our world that have potential downsides. Too many X-rays can cause radiation damage. Taking too many over-the-counter or prescription medicines can induce harmful medical conditions. Driving cars contributes to air pollution that can exacerbate conditions like asthma. But affirming a direct 5G connection to COVID-19 is neither conclusively proven nor even close to reality.

What sites like News Punch will not do is follow up and publish a retraction when it turns out they are wrong. For example, the article describing conclusive evidence also quotes another study as corroborative. But although it tells you that the second study was published on the NIH website, linking 5G deployment to the appearance of coronavirus in skin cells, it doesn’t note that the latter was recently retracted. No doubt, the study with “definitive proof” will soon go the retraction route based on its weak science and supposition rather than correlation or causation.

News Punch in the same article names Dr. Anthony Fauci as one of the villains suppressing “the truth” about 5G and COVID-19. Then it adds to the “facts” of its argument linking bee honey production to 5G deployment. And finally, it accuses Dr. Fauci of knowing for the past 15 years that hydroxychloroquine cures coronaviruses (which it does not ) of which COVID-19 is one. How prescient of the good doctor to have this knowledge and how evil of him not to share it.

The Peer-Review Conundrum and Credentialed Websites

COVID-19 isn’t brought on by 5G wireless deployment despite what serial producers of fake news and misinformation spew on the Internet. Just because studies appear on websites with good credentials doesn’t necessarily mean that the information they are providing is correct. That’s because peer-reviewed may not reflect what is actually taking place prior to an article being accepted for publication.

Today, peer-reviewed doesn’t have the same cachet as it has had in the past. This is happening because of the explosion in the number of scientific papers being published. Back in 2016, Nature published an article that stated scientific paper publishing was increasing at a rate of 8 to 9% per year and that this had been ongoing for several decades. In 2018, another Nature article noted that thousands of scientists were becoming hyper-prolific in publishing research at rates of one paper every five days. They were doing this because authorship was linked to scholarship which was linked to tenure in academia.

Another ongoing change to scientific publishing is the emergence of preprints. These are articles that get put on a server for general viewing by the scientific community. They have yet to be peer-reviewed. A study done in 2020, noted that more than 200,000 articles had appeared in the scientific literature on the subject of COVID-19. Many never made it beyond pre-print. And even those that went through a peer-review process, and got published ended up upon further review being retracted. This trend in COVID-19 articles continued through 2021 and 2022 and no doubt will in 2023. Many of these papers will appear briefly on legitimate peer-reviewed journal sites and then be retracted. Why this is happening relates to the volume increase and the lack of enough qualified reviewers capable of reading through this deluge of information. Many studies can get past a reviewer with no more than a look at the abstract. Considering the quality of writing in so many scientific papers these days, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Volume plus indecipherable prose is making peer review problematic.

But for those who are serial distributors of misinformation, the publishing explosion of weak science is an opportunity to cherry-pick content to conform to a fake news agenda and ideology. And because sites like News Punch continue to publish articles like these gathering an audience that is steeped in the world of conspiracy theories, its content is grist for their mill.

When the Internet began, and in the early days of social media sites, I naively thought that with barriers to universal communication and knowledge sharing disappearing, we would witness a levelling of the playing field where all nations and people would no longer be disadvantaged. But what I forgot was human nature’s dark side always rises to the occasion when presented with a new means to disseminate lies. It is our penchant to find the dark side combined with the Internet that makes a site like Breitbart be seen by some as legitimate when compared to legacy news organizations that publish verifiable facts and not fakery with a political agenda.

If you find this subject of interest, you may find an article published in the February 7th edition of USA Today written by Nate Trela worth reading.

In the United States alone that are more than a half million abandoned mines, most of them from coal. These are mines that have excavated shafts deep underground and installed elevators for vertical transportation and ventilation systems and life support systems. Once a mine is abandoned it seldom is rehabilitated leaving a hole in the ground that represents one of two things, an environmental menace, or one that could be an environmental benefit. Why the latter? Because those deep and long vertical shafts can be used for gravity batteries.

Back in 2012, I wrote about the GravityLight. This is a technology powered by ballast that generates electricity to light up an LED. The ballast bag is attached to a pulley attached to an LED lamp. When the bag is filled with soil, sand, or rock and released gravity-generated kinetic energy is produced which converts to electricity to light the light.

A gravity battery does the same thing without the light. The principle is the same for falling water turning turbines attached to generators in hydroelectric powerplants. It is all about converting kinetic energy from the force of gravity being exerted on a falling object which makes this a zero-emission energy source.

An article published in January entitled, “Underground Gravity Energy Storage: A Solution for Long-Term Energy Storage” in the journal Energies describes the technology. An international team of academics from Austria, Poland, China, Brazil, Finland, Croatia, Germany and Saudi Arabia have proposed what they call Underground Gravity Energy Storage (UGES) and it works like the GravityLight.

A UGES generates electricity using the weight of a large volume of sand and the kinetic force that can be harvested from the vertical drop in abandoned mine shafts. It is a storage battery that can feed the grid when intermittent renewable sources cannot generate the needed load across a power grid.

Sand gets stored at the top of the mine shaft. When the grid needs to stabilize the electricity load the call goes out to the UGES operator who releases the sand load down the shaft in a controlled plunge which creates kinetic energy to power turbines and generators. During low energy demand periods, power from the grid can be used to raise the sand back to the top of the shaft. An illustration below shows what an operating UGES would look like.

The authors of the paper estimate gravity batteries like the one above could operate at a cost of between USD $1 and $10 per Kilowatt-hour with the capacity to generate from 10 to 70 Terrawatt-hours of electricity.

Proposals for gravity batteries that use vertical drops include tower and high-rise building installations. Two such projects, one in Scotland, and the other in Switzerland are using weights between 50 and 60 tons that get dropped to generate renewable electricity. The building adaptation costs or tower new build would be more expensive than what is proposed here using abandoned mine shafts. With the latter nothing needs to be built to create the vertical drop which works best at depths greater than 200 metres (650 feet).

There are challenges in using decommissioned mines. Here are three I can think of:

1. Abandoned mines are prone to flooding from underground water sources.
2.  Abandoned mines, especially where coal has been extracted can be sources of methane leaks.
3. Shaft structural stability in an abandoned mine could be compromised leading to cave-ins.

Jean Lamoureux, the hospital’s Executive Director states, “The number of requests for mental-health consultations is estimated to have increased by 30 to 40 percent during the pandemic. These needs are urgent…and, thanks to the innovation of Paperplane Therapeutics and TELUS, we will transform the way health services are delivered, while having a significant positive impact on patient well-being through technology.”

Telus is one of Canada’s big three in telecommunications. The company has taken on an active role to address mental health in its workplace and to help its customers and Canadians in general.

Paperplane Therapeutics is a designer of therapeutic virtual reality video games. These games are designed to help patients with the pain and anxiety that often accompanies illness, surgical procedures and treatment.

Previous to the Alma Hospital announcement, Paperplane had successfully demonstrated its technology with CHU Sainte Justine and the Shriners Hospital for Children in Montreal. The success of the company’s program called DREAM proved that virtual reality can change a patient’s perception of pain. Dr. Bryan Tompkins, a Shriners Hospital pediatric orthopedic surgeon described the positive impact on children undergoing medical procedures noting that the use of VR helped them to “enter a calm, imaginary world.”

We know that children take to technology readily. VR is no exception. But what about adults? That’s the focus of Alma Hospital’s new program which is integrating immersive VR across many of its departments and practices. The addition of VR is seen as an effective tool for cognitive behavioural therapists who can now use it with adult patients as well as children to help them learn to deal with anxiety.

States Dr. Jean-Simon Fortin, CEO of Paperplane, “The virtual reality therapy that we offer places the patient in a calm and soothing world where they’re prompted to engage in deep breathing exercises, guided by a sensor that we’ve added to the virtual reality headset. This system combines two effective non-pharmaceutical approaches to reduce pain and anxiety, increase patient satisfaction, and make health care professionals’ work a bit easier.”

Dr. Luc Cossette, Head of Psychiatry at Alma is optimistic that the use of VR will lessen the need to prescribe drugs for pain and anxiety. In the hospital, Paperplane’s VR will be combined with a new device aimed at treating severe depression using magnetic stimulation. The hope is to deploy Paperplane hospital-wide for treating social phobias, and specifically in oncology to help with pain management during chemo and radiation therapy.

What is the role of Telus in the Alma Hospital Project? The telecommunications company will implement 5G throughout the hospital for optimal feeds and speeds for the VR technology from Paperplane which the company describes as purpose-built and clinically validated VR for cognitive behaviour therapy, useful as a standalone method of treatment or in combination with medications in clinical settings.

Before surgery, I had been dealing with osteoarthritis in both knees for almost two decades. My left knee was far worse than the right. I had been receiving cortisone injections regularly to keep me ambulatory. But in July 2020 I had a prosthetic joint implanted.

For years I had put off the surgery in the hope that a less invasive therapy using stem-cell-generated cartilage would become available. It is cartilage that provides cushioning to allow the knee joint to work without bone-on-bone contact. In osteoarthritis, the cartilage wears away until nothing is cushioning the immense stresses and loads that knees take on during daily activities.

As a surgeon explained to me, the reason stem-cell therapies to repair knees has yet to succeed isn’t that we cannot generate cartilage from stem cells, it is the collagen found in knee joints that cannot be restored or regrown. You may be familiar with collagen because of the many beauty supplements and treatments being sold on the market today. The collagen used for these isn’t the same as collagen found in knee joints. The complex collagen proteins in the knee are very different and play an important role in cartilage maintenance. Although we can generate chondrocytes (cartilage from stem cells), producing collagen suitable for knee therapies this way has yet to be done successfully.

So what research into non-surgical alternatives is being worked on today? An article entitled “Adhesive hydrogels in osteoarthritis: from design to application” appeared in the Springer Nature journal, Military Medical Research on January 30, 2023. It described research into developing hydrogels for osteoarthritic knee joint repair. Either natural or synthetic, the adhesive characteristics of hydrogels could be an answer.

Can Hydrogels Do The Work of Collagen?

As previously stated, hydrogels have great adhesive characteristics making them a good collagen substitute when attempting to regrow and restore cartilage in knee joints. The hydrogel material infiltrates the pores and irregularities found on tissue surfaces. This characteristic is called mechanical interlocking and it produces flat, slippery and firm surfaces. Injecting a layer of chondrocytes after hydrogels have bonded with the knee joint’s bone surfaces could become a potential non-surgical treatment. The problem, however, is that although the hydrogels bond to the bone, so far, getting the cartilage cells to do this has been another story.

A range of different adhesive hydrogels is being evaluated. The ideal is a hydrogel with double-sided adhesive characteristics to bond both bone and cartilage. Some are composed of contrasting structures. These are referred to as having double-network characteristics, elasticity on one side and stiffness on the other. Current research is looking at bacterially-engineered hydrogels coming from natural sources such as barnacles, mussels and sandcastle worms.

A material challenge for hydrogels will need to be tested when hardening. When used on knees they cannot be too brittle or too soft. The hydrogels have to stand up to the humid environment that characterizes our knees and bodies (we are mostly water). They have to respond to wear and tear caused by enormous stresses put on knee joints. And they have to be applied to the joint in the least invasive way possible. That’s a lot of issues still to be sorted.

The authors, in concluding their paper, summarize what future hydrogel-based treatments must provide:

1. Material characteristics that make bone and cartilage bond and work under various biochemical and environmental conditions aimed at rigid integration and mechanical stability.
2. Biological functionality equivalent to a healthy knee with performance and durability characteristics better than any knee prosthetic.

When I started my search for an alternative treatment for my osteoarthritis, it was more than a decade ago as I read and learned about stem cells, chondrocytes and collagen. And it likely will be another decade before non-surgical knee repairs using the techniques and materials described above become mainstream. The solution needs a multidisciplinary approach involving chemistry, biology, pharmaceuticals and significant clinical trials.

Envisioneering involves critiquing science fiction and extrapolating from it a future containing design elements of a universe not yet here.

Futurecrafting involves analyzing science fiction and finding examples of compelling technologies that could become real.

The topical coverage of this course included the future of matter, energy, medicine, food, cities, brains, emerging nations, sex/gender, commerce, politics, transport, aging, entertainment, design, religion, and more.

Students were asked to read a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy books and watch a number of films. Discussions in class introduced concepts such as digital fabrication, machine vision, speculative design, blockchain technology, mobility, learning, socio-tech, smart wear, interface design, machine learning, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.

I have read science fiction from a very early age. My first exposure was to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As I entered my teen years my bookshelf was filled with Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke novels and short stories.

When Stanley Kubrick gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was in my element. For me, these books and movies were more than an attempt for me to escape the reality of the present, but an affirmation of what could be in the future.

Star Trek in its many iterations populated its stories with future stuff, some of it, eerily similar to inventions that soon appeared in my present. It seemed science fiction could turn imagination into invention like nothing before. The Star Trek communicator of the 23rd century became the flip phone of the 20th. The health-tracking apps of today’s smartphones very much mimic the Star Trekkian Tricorder.

An entire industry has arisen in recent times, through the XPrize and similar global competitions focused on futurecrafting solutions to intractable problems. Many are inspired by science fiction and have produced breakthrough technologies.

That’s what futurecrafting is all about, working on the big problems of our time, exploring and prototyping to address challenges like curing disease, solving climate change, living on other worlds, communicating with non-human intelligence both animate and inanimate (AI) right here on Earth, and searching and finding intelligence and technical civilizations elsewhere beyond our planet.

A friend of mine, Chris Smedley, is in the process of developing a Futurecrafting Earth primer. His goal is to engage people around the world who seek to change the planet through positive collaborative solutions with purpose and inspired by science fiction.

“What begins as a story, a fantasy can be turned into a reality,” states Chris in the preamble of his primer. He has been in pursuit of the future for much of his life and is the creator of the founder of Digital Habitats. The goal is to stage content related to the futurecrafting of Earth and the launch of the World Builders Guild.

In a call to action as if it were coming from beyond Earth, Chris has issued an urgent help wanted by the third planet from the Sun in the Solar System, a place called Earth. He notes that the primary technologically advanced species on this planet, known as homo sapiens or humans, are in notable distress and in need of assistance to solve planet-threatening problems including:

• through population growth and exploitation of natural resources humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet to continue to maintain their civilization,
• the activity of humans is causing global climate change and threatening other species with extinction,
• through human conflict and negative interactions, lethal weapons capable of destroying the advanced technological civilization these humans have created represent another extinction threat.

The impact of the virus has gone well beyond the realm of health. It has challenged societal norms, the way we work, and our trust in government.

It has disrupted globalization, the economic force driving the planet for more than four decades.

It has made it more difficult to focus on the other existential crisis of the age, climate change.

It has moved the Doomsday Clock, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ measure, closer to midnight. It hasn’t done this on its own but has been ably assisted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the global threat to food security exacerbated by conflict and climate.

At the same time, COVID-19 has accelerated technological innovation in biomedicine and produced new drugs, vaccines, and treatments at an unprecedented rate. The accelerant for biopharma was vast amounts of money coming from governments desperately trying to stem the infection and death rates from COVID-19.

The speed may have fuelled social anxiety as expressed in widespread disinformation becoming a thing.  Anti-vaxxers who had protested measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines for children having latched on to erroneous studies linking the treatment to autism, now focused on new COVID-19 serums. Their vaccine hesitancy message has been widely disseminated using the global voice of the Internet and social media.

The NEJM article describes the current moment as “a pivotal one.” Why? Because the continuing level of threat from COVID-19 is perceived to have waned. “Objectively we are in a better place with regard to the virus than we’ve ever been” states the article.

It was just last summer when America’s President, Joe Biden, casually remarked that COVID-19 was now behind us. It was “over.” That was before this fall’s emergence of the latest Omicron variant sweeping across the world.

The NEJM article argues that we still need feasible solutions, policies and programs to address what it calls “a new, nonemergency phase of the pandemic.” This means public health and trusted community leaders need to do the job of communicating and disseminating what is known and what is recommended for the general public.

It means continuous engagement, not detachment. It calls for consistency to manage the virus from the current pandemic phase to one that is very much like annual seasonal influenza programs for vaccination and treatment.

The politicization of COVID-19 has to end. Governments owe citizens access to credible information resources, not messaging to serve political gain. Political expedience should play no role in disseminating incontrovertible science.

The NEJM article calls for a “move away from universal recommendations, or population-wide prevention policy, toward a more differentiated or tailored approach — one that takes into account the characteristics of various communities and the pathogen.” In other words, NEJM is talking about tailored guidance that reflects local risks and addresses disparities in treatment resulting from socioeconomics, ethnicity, and a lack of health resources and insurance.

The Problems That Remain Unaddressed by the NEJM Article

Because a substantial number of people on the planet have insufficient antibodies to combat COVID-19 as variants emerge, and because levels of vaccination in the global population have yet to achieve herd immunity conditions, the virus will continue to spin off into new forms.

If we are lucky, new variants will be better adapted to coexist in our bodies. At best when infected we will get mild symptoms that last a few days and will develop natural antibodies to give us immunity. But a variant could emerge that causes spikes in death rates, particularly among vulnerable populations including the unvaccinated and those who are immunocompromised.

If we move away from a pandemic to endemic conditions where COVID-19 can be treated in the same manner as influenza, with annual new vaccines made available to all, we will have turned the corner on this virus and have learned enough to prepare ourselves for the next new virus that jumps from animal populations into humans. And although I know that some conspiracy theorists believe the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory where bioweapons are studied, biopharma and governments will have learned an invaluable lesson about the need for speed in addressing the disruptive changes that seem to be a characteristic of this 21st century.

The study using AI comes from Stanford University and Colorado State and appears in the January 30, 2023 edition of the journal PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States.

The AI used is a neural network that has been trained using climate models and fed historical temperature observations. The neural network’s predictions on historic temperature shifts have been dead on which has provided the researchers with a sense of assurance that the AI’s future predictions are likely dead on.

What is the AI predicting? A forecast that has 1.5 Celsius being reached between 2033 and 2035. mean warming of the atmosphere will happen. The study concludes that “even if the climate forcing pathway is substantially reduced in the near term” which means regardless of what actions we take to reduce emissions between now and the mid-2030s, atmospheric temperatures will cross the 1.5 Celsius threshold with a “high probability of reaching the 2 Celsius threshold by mid-century.” A rise of 2 Celsius is equivalent to 3.6 Fahrenheit degrees hotter. The probability of reaching that threshold is weighted as four-in-five by 2060.

So how do you train a neural network to become a climatologist? The research team fed maps of annual mean temperatures including anomalies to it. The maps covered a geographic range of 72 degrees of latitude and 144 of longitude. The neural network then weighed the data input and minimized any perceived biases. Once trained on submitted data the neural network was asked to make sample predictions of temperature rise within a historic frame of reference outside the geographic parameters of the data input. These out-of-sample predictions validated the neural network’s capability of forecasting future climate change.

Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate scientist, and Elizabeth Barnes, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, affirmed their belief that the world will hit the 2 Celsius rise even as emissions decline over the next several decades. Why? Because of the latency effect of carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. In other words, there already is a 2 Celsius rise built in that will play out by the time in question.

These findings contradict the consensus produced by scientists and policymakers who produce the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Their most recent predictions state that the 2 Celsius mark will not be reached if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be drawn down to net zero before 2080.

Where is the thermometer now? The researchers used an acid test to see if the AI could predict that number. It did this by looking at the history studied between 1980 and 2021 data, stating that global mean atmospheric temperatures would be 1.1 Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures by 2022. That accuracy astonished Diffenbaugh who in a Stanford news release stated that he was surprised by the AI. He states “The fact that the AI has such high accuracy increases my confidence in its predictions of future warming.”

Going forward the AI has predicted atmospheric temperatures to have a one-in-two chance by 2054 of hitting the 2.0 Celsius threshold, and a two-in-three chance of crossing it between 2044 and 2065. The chart below provides a sample of the AI’s low and high prediction levels between now and 2065.

The only way to bend these odds means a concerted effort by all producers of GHGs to reduce the output of carbon dioxide, methane and other atmospheric-warming gasses from every aspect of their operations. It is no longer a question of meeting the lower 1.5 Celsius objective, but avoiding the 2 Celsius scenario with unintended and unpredictable consequences for the planet’s ecosystems.

Scientific and Medical Journals Respond to ChatGPT

The kerfuffle over ChatGPT’s use has roiled the waters of science and technology publications. In an editorial appearing on January 31, 2023, the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) and the JAMA Network, addressed the implications of non-human authorship and ChatGPT specifically.

In instructions to author submissions, JAMA asked for full disclosure on any content created where a tool to assist in the writing was used. (Does that include spell and grammar checkers?)

JAMA asked that the information regarding ChatGPT use should appear in the acknowledgements and describe how the content was created or edited. If another language modelling tool was used, it should also be revealed.

Having said that JAMA’s publisher noted that submissions created using AI should be discouraged. Going beyond ChatGPT, it also discouraged the use of AI tools to produce images appearing in submitted papers. It concluded that AI tools are “transformative, disruptive technologies” that “create promise and opportunities as well as risks and threats for all involved in the scientific enterprise.” Obviously, the perceived threat in JAMA’s estimation outweighed the promise.

The journals Science and Nature have also introduced rules for the use of generative AI with ChatGPT mostly in mind. Science warns researchers that they could be charged with professional misconduct if they submit manuscripts that use ChatGPT or any other large language AI model.

In its editorial policies, Science states “text generated from AI, machine learning, or similar algorithmic tools, cannot be used in papers published in Science.” It doesn’t even want to consider crediting ChatGPT in authorship. Nature states it will not accept any paper that lists ChatGPT or other AI software as contributors. It goes on to describe the need for full disclosure when using any large language model (LLM) tool. Both Science and Nature describe the use of ChatGPT in works submitted as “plagiarism” noting the need for full accountability based on the principle that all submissions must be human-created original works.

Are Governments Missing in Action on ChatGPT?

Is ChatGPT among other technological and disruptive innovations outracing the guardrails of regulatory oversight? No government agency or committee in the U.S. and Canada today is looking at the implications of ChatGPT entering the public realm.

In October of last year, the U.S. Office of Science & Technology Policy issued its blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. OpenAI hadn’t yet revealed ChatGPT to the public. Hence, nothing in this Bill of Rights references large language models. The document acknowledges that unchecked algorithms can be problematic and focuses on:

• ensuring that AI usage is safe and effective,
• that its usage doesn’t lead to discriminatory acts against people,
• that the data it parses isn’t used for abusive purposes,
• that when it is used by designers there must be full disclosure,
• and that if used, there should be opting-out provisions.

I think in light of ChatGPT the Bill of Rights needs to be updated.

In a very different type of response to the arrival of ChatGPT, an article in the January 26, 2023 issue of The Conversation, asked if an outright universal LLM ban makes sense. It posed a question. Couldn’t the incorporation of this type of tool enhance the quality of academic papers and journalism? The article suggested that a ChatGPT or other LLM could be used to generate acceptable content to help organize and explain material more cogently than a human author alone. It went on to state that with the arrival of AI LLMs “there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle” so why not embrace the technology rather than rejecting it outright? It argued that a tool like ChatGPT “could help democratize the research process.”

Detecting ChatGPT in Authored Works

The Register took a different stance in an article it published this week that posed the question, “Can editors and publishers detect text generated by LLMs?”

Coming up with an AI LLM detector has become the goal of the editors of both Science and Nature, as well as many universities, colleges, and high schools. In the case of the two aforementioned journals, the editors have invited software tool creators to send them their LLM detection software. They shouldn’t have to wait long because even the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI has built an LLM detector that although not 100% effective, works fairly well. Joining OpenAI are many others in business and academic circles.

The editors of Science and Nature remain adamant in their opposition to ChatGPT. They will not accept that authors require an AI to write papers and articles for their publications. Machines have their place. They are useful as tools for formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. Machines can compute large amounts of data and can help parse the results. But without exception, machines shouldn’t become wordsmiths and write the copy. That the editors say is the exclusive purview of human authors.

I only have one comment for the editors at Science and Nature. I read many of the papers that appear in your publications and I only wish that the authors of them could learn to be good writers. I don’t single out these two publications for being at fault. Because science and technology journals today seem to be filled with content seriously lacking in quality prose. The writing is jargon rich, awkward, and sometimes unintelligible. I don’t know what this says about the peer review process and often wonder if the reviewers are equally incapable of writing a coherent sentence let alone a paper.

Cardiologists have a suite of tools designed to monitor heart function. Ultrasounds, also known as echocardiograms, are used to get a look at the physical heart using sound waves. An ultrasound can tell a cardiologist a lot. Are the four chambers normal in appearance? Are the valves functioning properly? Are there leaks? Are they seeing normal blood flow? Is the heart muscle contracting as it should?

To detect irregularities in the heart’s conduction system, electrocardiography is used. This involves getting tracings of the electrical signature of all four chambers and the major blood vessels. When done in a medical office, leads are applied to various areas of the body, upper chest, abdomen and legs. A more portable approach is to use a Holter Monitor which can be worn externally for a number of days to provide a complete record of every beat and missed beat. Then there are portable devices like the Apple Watch and the one I use, Kardiamobile, a pad that combines with a smartphone app to give me a 30-second electrocardiogram which I can then send to my cardiologist. If I have an odd feeling in my chest, I use the pad which is split in two, with two fingers pressed on each side. Since being diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (aF) I tend to use it at least once a day or anytime I feel light-headed or have odd palpitations in my chest.

In addition to the ultrasound imaging previously described, heart function can also be assessed by an MRI, CT scan, and X-rays. More invasive are cardiac catheterization procedures which involve inserting a catheter into a blood vessel and threading it into the heart where a contrast dye and X-ray provide a good two-dimensional real-time image of the heart as it works.

But what if you could put a patch on your skin and use it to monitor heart function? Up until now, wearable devices that used leads to contact the skin, or watches were the only ones capable of producing heart data useful to medical practitioners. These were exclusively focused on the heart’s conduction system. But with a new invention from the University of California San Diego, these may soon be joined by a companion wearable the size of a postage stamp that could become the way ultrasonic images of the heart are taken.

The patch provides accurate continuous monitoring of cardiac performance using ultrasound images. The illustrations below come from an article published in the January 25, 2023 edition of the journal Nature.

The wearable patch contains liquid metal composite electrodes and piezoelectric transducers. It can image deep into the body and provide a range of images including axial, elevational, and lateral views. Compared to regular ultrasounds the differences when looked at by third parties were considered negligible.

Unlike regular echos, the images this patch can gather can see the heart when a patient is in motion rather than lying on an examination table. Ultrasounds cannot image the image when it is under stress, only after a stress test when the patient is then examined. Conventional ultrasounds use gels which are critical to being able to obtain images. Gels are constantly reapplied throughout an imaging session. The patch uses liquid silicone which retains its liquid state for a full 24 hours so that images can continuously be gathered.

The developers have also created deep learning modelling software which when combined with the images provides measurements of stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fractions making this technology not only versatile but also likely the next tool in a cardiologist’s arsenal.